4K?
I guess we just skipped the entire Blu-ray generation and maybe will, finally, get an Ultra HD release? Or are they going to skip this gen as well? Come on Cameron, this is straight up ridiculous.
shareSo what have all these years of waiting resulted in? Some of the worst discs ever released. AI, DNRed, oversharpened monstrosities that should immediately find their way into the nearest garbage bin.
True Lies and Aliens are the biggest and most worthless hunks of shit, but the AI tendrils have wormed their way into The Abyss and Titanic as well. At least they're working off native 4K transfers unlike Aliens, but it's still unnatural looking and oversharpened to hell. And that's not even mentioning the pitiful low-nit HDR.
All we needed was legitimate 4K scans that hadn't been ran through fucking Topaz AI, but I guess Cameron felt compelled to one-up himself from the horrendous T2 release. Dude should be legitimately ashamed. And the clown show he used to produce this calamity, Peter Jackson's Park Road, should be universally banned from ever touching a pixel or film stock again.
Pull your deluded ass out of Avatar land, Jim, and come back to reality. For fucking shame.
Watched the UHD today. Some shots look nice, others look over-sharpened. AI fuckery is rarely seen, but unfortunately so is any natural grain.
The Abyss seems to have escaped the horrific digital mutilation that T2, Aliens and True Lies suffered. I’m grateful for that but Cameron should be physically punished for harming those classic films.
He seems to hate them and considers them products of a time before he ‘worked the testosterone out of his system’, he wants us to watch his shitty eco-propaganda Smurf films instead. Twat.
I guess it is a minor blessing that The Abyss is at least watchable and not totally mangled, but it's very frustrating to know that a beautiful native 4K scan exists that we'll likely never get to see without the fuckery.
It seems similar to the DNR/oversharpening that was done on Titanic, but at least with Titanic I can just go back to the Blu-ray - which has a much more natural presentation. My alternative for The Abyss would be the hybrid fan-edited 1080p TV rip, which is only decent at best.
Nothing is really gained with the HDR as well, which is almost nonexistent with essentially no additional highlight detail. So I would literally never choose to watch the horrendous Aliens "4K" (2K AI upscaled) over the Blu-ray. Park Road Post even applied a bunch of oversharpening for The Hobbit 4K releases, ffs... which was shot on fucking digital. These people are complete hacks.
Overall, Cameron seems obsessed with making these classic 35mm films look overly digital and synthetic, with natural film grain being the enemy - even though it's literally part of the image itself and where all the fine detail lies. It really is a travesty.